Settling Suggestion Improvements

[itanasi]

Bring up floor for Settle Suggestions, and increase radius to a fixed 5 tiles for Player UI icons only
Add distance from Settler penalty to help keep suggestions closer and more stable (suggestion won't jump away as Settler approaches as often)
Human Suggestions do not take into account unseen resources

[EmperorPinguin]

#12772 should hide unseen resources for both human and AI.

[EmperorPinguin]

I strongly advice against raising the treshold for minimum acceptable tiles. While we do want to filter out the worst tiles, it can happen our starting continent is all bare tundra. We don't want to go OCC; it's better to found bad cities. than to found no cities at all.

[EmperorPinguin]

If I understand correctly, this distance penalty is based on the distance to the settler, so it will move along with the settler, and not actually do anything besides making the suggested city locations jump around more?

[itanasi]

OK, reverted the threshold and removed conflicts with #12772
So the main 2 changes then are the Player Settle Suggestions in the UI will always be a 5 tile radius (instead of shrinking further from cities), and adding the % penalty further from the Settler.
The % Penalty should keep the suggestions more stable across the board for both the suggestion icon in the UI and for AI automation.

[EmperorPinguin]

OK, reverted the threshold and removed conflicts with #12772 So the main 2 changes then are the Player Settle Suggestions in the UI will always be a 5 tile radius (instead of shrinking further from cities), and adding the % penalty further from the Settler. The % Penalty should keep the suggestions more stable across the board for both the suggestion icon in the UI and for AI automation.

Increasing the range to a set 5 tiles for human is unquestionably good, but are you sure the distance to settler penalty doesn't move along with the settler? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I read it as distance to settler that will be calculated anew when the settler moves to a new tile, which makes that the AI will value the same tile differently than it did the previous turn, which could lead to the AI moving the settler back and forth (or in circles) between the same tiles.

[itanasi]

The penalty is any distance from the Settler.

If there is a tile that's better than the one you're currently on, moving towards it will remove the penalty. Therefore you will arrive at a local maxima.

Example:
Stand on Tile A, score 70.
Next tile over, Tile B, base score 73, after penalty, 73*.97=70.81
Tile B is better! Move to Tile B.
Now, standing on Tile B. Score 73.
Tile A is now 70*.97=67.9. Worse than B! Stay on B!

[EmperorPinguin]

It should indeed converge into a local maximum. There's a bit of a risk the AI will settle "too early", but that's desireable over settling "too late" I think. Have you tested if they can now handle a constant search radius (5 tiles)? If such doesn't lead to wandering off, it'll probably improve the quality of settles a bit.